Foreigner

“That one’s still figuring it out,” Banichi said. The number one plane was coming back again. They were caught on an open hillside, and Banichi and Jago and Cenedi and the rest of them drew calm aim, tracked it as it came—Cenedi said, at the last moment, “Behind the cowling.”

They opened up, gunfire echoing off the other hill.

The plane roared over and didn’t drop its bombs. It ripped just above the crest of the hill and a second later a loud explosion shook the ground.

Nobody cheered. The second plane was coming in fast and they were on the move again, picking their way over the rocks, traveling as fast as they could. Thunder boomed again. One assumed it was thunder. The second plane came over again and dropped its bombs too soon. They hit the hill crest.

They descended the steep way, then, into a narrow ravine, a smaller window for the plane at its speed than it was for them. They heard a plane coming. Its engine was sputtering as thunder—it had to be thunder—rolled and rumbled in the distance.

That plane’s crippled, Bren thought. Something’s wrong with it. God, there’s hope.

He didn’t think it would drop its bombs. He watched it make its pass in the narrow sky above them.

Then an explosion went off right over them, and Nokhada jumped. A sharp impact hit his shoulder, and the rider next to him went down—he didn’t see why—brush came at his face and he put up a hand to protect himself as Nokhada ran him up the hill and stopped close to Babs.

He was half-deaf from the blast, but not so he couldn’t hear mecheiti screaming in fright or pain. He looked back, saw riders down where he’d been, and tried to turn back. Nokhada had other ideas and fought him on the slope, until other riders went back.

But Banichi was still in sight; he saw Jago among those afoot, heard a single gunshot. The screaming stopped abruptly, leaving the silence and the ringing of his ears; then, after a moment of milling about, and another of Nokhada’s unwilling turn-abouts on the slope, he saw people mounting up again, the column reorganizing itself.

A rider came forward in the line, and reported to Cenedi and Ilisidi three men dead, and one of the names was Giri.

He felt—he didn’t know what, then. An impact to the gut. The loss of someone he knew, a known quantity when so much was changing around him—he felt it personally; but he was glad at the same time it wasn’t Banichi or Jago, and he supposed in a vague, dazed way, that his sense of loss was a selfish judgement, on selfish human standards that had nothing to do with man’chi, or what atevi felt or didn’t feel.

He didn’t know right and wrong any longer. His head ached. His ears were still ringing and there was a stink of smoke and gunpowder in every breath he drew. Dirt had spattered him and Nokhada, even this far up the column, dirt and bits of leaves—he wasn’t sure what else had, and he didn’t want to know. He only kept remembering the shock of the bomb bursting, a wall of air and fragments that made itself one with the explosions on the road—recalled the shock of something hitting his arm with an impact that still ached. It was a fluke, that single accurate bomb. It might not happen again.

Or it might on the next such strike—he didn’t know how much farther they had to ride or how long their enemies could keep putting up planes from Maidingi Airport and hitting at them over and over again, with nothing, nothing they could do about it.

But the second plane didn’t come back, whether it had crashed in the mountains or made it back to the airport, and in the meantime the rumbling of thunder grew louder.

In a while more, clouds swept in, bringing cold air, first, then a spatter of rain, a crack of thunder. The riders around him delved into packs without getting down, pulled out black plastic rain-cloaks and began to settle them on as the drops began to fall. He hoped for the same in his gear, and discovered it in the pack beside his knee, someone’s providence in this season of cold mountain rains. He sorted it out in the early moments of the rain, settled it over his head and over as much of him and the riding-pad as he could, latching it up about his throat as the chill deluge began, blinding him with its gusts and trickling down his neck.

The plastic kept body heat in, his and Nokhada’s, the turbulence and the cloud cover up above the hills was a shield from aircraft, and if he froze where the stiff gusts plastered the plastic against his body or whipped up the edges of it on a shirt and coat begi

For the most part he trusted Nokhada to follow Babs, tucked his hands under his arms and asked himself where Ilisidi’s strength possibly came from, because the more he let himself relax, the more his own was giving way, and the more the shivers did get through. Thin bodies chill faster, Giri had said that, he was sure it had been Giri, who was dead, now, spattered all over a hillside.

His brain kept re-hearing the explosions.

Kept falling into black patches, when he shut his eyes, kept being back in that cellar, listening to the thunder, feeling a gun against his head and knowing Cenedi would do it again and for real, because Cenedi’s anger with humans was tied up with Ilisidi’s ambition and what had and hadn’t been possible for atevi to achieve even before that ship appeared in the skies, he read that much. Cenedi’s man’chiwas with Ilisidi, the rebels offered Ilisidi association with them, Ilisidi had told Cenedi find out what the paidhi was, and in Cenedi’s eyes, it was his fault he’d convinced her not to take that rebel offer.

Hence Cenedi’s anger—at him, at Ilisidi’s surrendering her fight for the seat in Shejidan—to age, to time, to God knew what motive. The paidhi had no confidence he could interpret anything, not even himself, lately. He’d become a commodity for trade among atevi factions. He didn’t even know who owned him at the moment—didn’t know why Cenedi had waited on the hill for Banichi.

Didn’t know why Jago had been angry at him, for going after Banichi.

Jago… make a deal with Cenedi? Betray Tabini andBanichi? He didn’t think so.

He refused to think so, for no logical reason, only a human one—which didn’t at all apply to her. He knew that, if he knew nothing else, in the confusion of his thoughts. But he didn’t change his opinion.

Hill after hill after hill in the blinding rain.

Then another deeply cut ravine, where a tall growth of ironheart sheltered them from the blasts, and the thready leaves streamed and clumped with water, dumping it, when they chanced to brush against them, in small, icy floods that found their way down necks, more often than not.

But that cover of brush was the first relief from the wind they’d found, and Ilisidi called a rest and bunched them up, the twelve of them—only twelve surviving riders, he was dismayed to realize, and six mecheid on their own, trailing them through brush and along the stony hillsides. He hadn’t realized the losses, he hadn’t counted… he didn’t know where they might have lost the others, or whether, at some silent signal he’d missed, the party had divided itself.

He held on to the mounting-straps and slid down Nokhada’s wet side, not sure he could get up again unaided, but glad enough to rest. For the first moment he had to stand holding to Nokhada’s harness just to keep his feet, his legs were so rubbery from riding. Lightning flickered and the thunder muttered over their heads. He could scarcely walk on the rain-slick hillside without grabbing onto branches and leaning on one rock and the next. He wandered like a drunken man along the steep slope, seeking a warm spot and a place a little more out of the wind. He saw that Banichi had gotten down—and he worked his way in that direction, where four other men had gathered, with Jago, one of them squatting down beside her and holding Banichi’s ankle. The water-soaked boot was stretched painfully tight over the joint.